A Game Sustained

25 Keeping going: 1914-1915 It will be a great relief to many players when stumps are pulled up, for the season ends this evening, and the sense of the unfitness of things has been growing steadily… while cricket was taking place in the centre of the Hove enclosure Army recruits were being drilled in full view in the top part of the ground. The two things don’t dovetail at all. 25 Yorkshire had batted half-heartedly on the final afternoon, with Major Booth – in the unusual position of opener – having his middle stump removed for just nine, to make what tragically turned out to be his very last contribution for the county side. Even with the ending of county cricket and all that was happening on the Continent, some still defended the idea of ‘carrying on’. Reporting the cancellation of the Scarborough Festival, the Sheffield Independent protested about the attacks on sports-lovers who did not think it necessary to abandon everything, and reminded readers that ‘business as usual’ was a national motto. For others though it was clear that it was time to be serious. A recruiting officer who had travelled all over Yorkshire in the second half of August and early September complained he had seen: hundreds perhaps thousands, of healthy vigorous young men hanging about, motoring in pleasure parties, on the sands at seaside towns, taking girls for joy rides on motor bicycles, playing cricket, even looking on at cricket, philandering with young women, and watching those who have taken up the burden; doing anything but fit themselves to ward off the awful ruin that stares their country in the face and which an unfortunate incident or military blunder on the Continent might bring to their very doors to-morrow. 26 Nevertheless, at this point thousands of men did join up across the county. On 3 September, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph commented that the young men of Sheffield ‘have flung aside the tennis racquet and the cricket bat’ and poured into the Town Hall in answer to the call of the country. The